The blog for the cult Manhattan cable-access TV show that offers viewers the best in "everything from high art to low trash... and back again!" Find links to rare footage, original reviews, and reflections on pop culture and arthouse cinema.

Saturday, October 27, 2012

Last year around
this time I paid tribute to the classic horror TV series Dark
Shadows. This Halloween I want to throw the spotlight on
another one of the finest horror series ever, Kolchak: the
Night Stalker. Derived from two TV-movies and cancelled
after just one season of 20 episodes, the show is revered
by horror and fantasy fans, as well it should be.

The premise was very
simple: veteran reporter Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) uncovers a
different supernatural or paranormal phenomenon in every episode,
cracks the story wide open, and then has his article squelched by his
editor, the local authorities, or the federal government.

One of the many
reasons the show is so beloved by its fans is the notion of Kolchak’s
Sisyphus-like job as a reporter. It’s a given that none of his
stories will ever see the light of print, yet he continues on,
remaining employed strictly because his harried boss Anthony Vincenzo
(sublime character actor Simon Oakland) respects him.

The show was unique
in that it contained a very healthy dose of humor. Kolchak was a man
out of time — a mid-Seventies reporter who wore a cheap straw hat
and a seersucker suit (the out-of-date wardrobe was McGavin’s own
idea — he said he saw the character as stuck in the early Sixties).
He was a comic figure who inhabited a comic environment (the newsroom
of INS, a lesser wire service), but who deeply believed in his
profession and would do anything, including putting his life in
jeopardy, to get his story.

Like the original
Star Trek, the show’s strength lay in its
scripting and casting. The people who have put it down over the years
(more on that below) have complained about the often
threadbare-looking monsters and the ridiculous idea that one reporter
could encounter so many different menaces.

Well, the show’s
scripters, among them David “The Sopranos” Chase (who served as
the show’s story editor), a young Robert Zemeckis, and Hammer
stalwart Jimmy Sangster (The Horror of Dracula, The Curse of
Frankenstein), carried it off by creating a raft of
extremely imaginative threats, included monsters from Native
American, Cajun, and Haitian legends. My all-time favorite (see
below) is the East Indian monster who appears to you in the form of
the person you trust the most, in Sangster’s episode “Horror in
the Heights.”

The supporting cast
was also perfect for their cartoonlike roles, from Jack Grinnage's prissy reporter to Ruth McDevitt as the grandmotherly advice columnist
to the sublime Simon Oakland as the long-suffering Vincenzo.

The premier casting
coup, though, was the star himself. Darren McGavin positively shone
in the part, as he was able to capably balance the show’s humor and
chills. He also possessed a terrific voice and was one of the
all-time great hardboiled voiceover men — he had formerly starred
in the Mike Hammer TV show in 1958-59, where he
refined his craft.

Kolchak represented
a fascinating bridge between newspaper comedies of the Thirties like
The Front Page, and the post-Woodward and
Bernstein “reporter as free speech hero” films and TV narratives.
In fact, the most interesting thing about the show was its
anti-establishment stance. Carl Kolchak tries to expose the truth,
but is constantly lied to by the police, politicians, and other
authority figures. The killer-robot episode “Mr. R.I.N.G.” has Kolchak learning that a coverup has been put in place to
uphold “national security.”

It’s refreshing to
find a piece of popular entertainment that so blatantly has as one of
its themes the fact that the government lies to us (a lot). One of
the most common tropes in the series finds Kolchak’s photographs
and audio cassettes being either confiscated by the police or
destroyed. The only thing he’s left with is his trusty tape
recorder, into which he recounts the full story after the menace has
been disposed of.

Given the fact that
that the show is held in very high regard by many horror and fantasy
fans, it surprised me upon researching the series to discover that
there was a very vocal minority of people who thought the series was
a “mistake” — that only the two TV-movies should have been made
— and that those people included the folk behind the creation of
the original TV movies.

In the book Night
Stalking: a 20th Anniversary Kolchak Companion, author Mark
Dawidziak — who himself confesses that he thinks the series was a
mistake (although he wrote not one but two books about it) — got
interviews with all of the principals involved in the original pair
of TV-movies, and all of them complain that the Kolchak
series was completely misguided.

Scripter Richard
Matheson, producer-director Dan Curtis, the creator of the Kolchak
character, Jeff Rice, and Darren McGavin himself all agreed that the two TV-movies were terrific, but they disliked the notion of doing a Kolchak TV series. After the show became a massive cult hit in reruns, McGavin
was fond of noting that he had a terrible time working on it
because it was produced in such a last-minute fashion (the shows were
shot in six days and aired in the order they were shot in, McGavin
noting “We were turning in wet negatives”).

Add to the dissenting voices Stephen
King, who derided the series in his book Danse Macabre
We do have to keep in mind, however, that this comes from a talented
craftsman who feels that every single line he writes is worthy of
publication (you ain't Dostoevsky or Pynchon, Steve, you're a goddamned genre novelist!). As for film/TV
entertainment, remember that King felt that the Kubrick
Shining could be improved upon by a meager U.S. TV
miniseries; he thought a similarly anemic rewrite of von Trier’s
sensational The Kingdom was necessary; and he
botched the EC formula for horror in his tribute to those classic
comics, Creepshow.

The Dawidziak book
(written in 1991) also contains statements in praise of the show. The
late mystery writer and film historian Stuart Kaminsky and several TV
critics, including NPR’s David Bianculli, go on the record
proclaiming the show to be one of the best fantasy series ever to air
on American TV. At this point, you could definitely add to that
chorus producer-writer Chris Carter, who has professed a major love
for the show and has stated that it was one of the key inspirations
for his X-Files — since Kolchak was the first TV
character to notice that “there's something out there.”

I fall in with the
latter camp. I think Kolchak: the Night Stalkerwas one of the best horror series ever and was also a triumph when it
came to mixing horror and humor. Sure, the monsters were often
super-cheap looking, but a good deal of the low-budget sci-fi and
horror films of the Fifties and Sixties contain bargain-basement
creatures.

Thus, I urge you to
check out the series and the two telefilms, all of which are
currently online for free, thanks to three very generous posters, “naysgrace”
and “Ocean71fvr”
having posted the bulk of the series, with “wgdvds”
picking up the slack and posting the remaining eps. Below I choose the must-see ten of the 22 Kolchak adventures.

No one – including
the dogmatic and all-too-wordy Stephen King – disputes that the
original Night Stalker TV-movie from 1972 is a
classic of its kind. When we first meet Carl Kolchak, he's working in
Las Vegas and the menace he uncovers is a vampire (Barry Atwater):

The second Kolchak
TV-movie, The Night Strangler (1973) finds Carl in
Seattle investigating an immortal strangler. The supporting cast in
this telefilm is filled with familiar faces:

The first episode of
the Kolchak TV series establishes that Carl and
his boss have set down roots in Chicago. The first menace encountered
there is a killer who may be Jack the Ripper:

The second episode
pits Carl against a zombie killer, resurrected by voodoo (the Mafia
are also involved, and the chief don insults Kolchak's “two dollar
hat”). One of the standard plot devices in the series was for Carl
to discover an arcane ritual that would kill the monster in question;
this episode contains one of the best death-rituals in the entire
series:

One of the best
traditional monster tales in the series was the fourth episode, “The
Vampire,” in which Carl hunts down a vampiress in Los Angeles (who
happens to have been “turned” by the vampire in the original
Night Stalker TV-movie):

Dark
Shadows' Lara Parker is a fashion model who just happens to
be a witch in the lively episode “The Trevi Collection”:

“Firefall”
contains one of the images from the series that has haunted me since
childhood. Kolchak hiding in a church as a deadly doppelganger bangs
at a high church window trying to get at him. In this case, the
doppelganger looks like an orchestra conductor and set his victims on
fire:

I will close out
with three of the best paranoia scenarios. The first is a UFO saga in
which Carl finds out that the government has covered up the fact that
killer aliens (who live by sucking bone marrow out of their victims)
have landed on Earth. The title of the episode is the rather
portentous “They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be....”:

A Cajun man involved
in a sleep experiment unleashes a swamp monster in Chicago in “The
Spanish Moss Murders.”

And finally, my
all-time favorite episode in the series, “Horror in the Heights.”
Here grisly killings take place when an ancient Indian monster
assumes the form of the person most trusted by its victims. Phil
Silvers guest stars, and Jimmy Sangster's tight and imaginative
script shows how good the series could be when all the elements were
at their best:

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Sylvia Kristel’s
death last week at the relatively young age of 60 as a result of
complications from a long battle with lung cancer brought back
memories to many of us of her mid-Seventies heyday as
the softcore sex queen. An extremely attractive,
but refreshingly not “bodacious,” presence, she was genuinely
sexy, and although she lamented in later years that her acting career
had never gone quite where she wanted it to, her triumph was always
in exuding sensuality without seeming either phony or forced.

Dutch by nationality
but always mistaken for French because of her best-known film work,
Kristel had been a secretary and a beauty contest winner before she
took the plunge and starred in Just Jaeckin’s landmark softcore
feature Emmanuelle in 1974.

The posters quietly
stated, “X was never like this,” and it was indeed true: the film
ranked alongside Radley Metzger’s features as being one of the
classiest bits of film erotica ever. It thus garnered several
distinctions. Among them was the fact that it played in Paris not in
a porn house, but in a theater on the Champs-Elysees, and in America
it was shown not in grindhouses but in arthouses thanks to its being
distributed (with subtitles yet!) by Columbia Pictures.

Shortly after her
“Emmanuelle” fame, Kristel was cast by two auteurs (Chabrol and
Robbe-Grillet, more on this below), but the majority of the films she
worked in in both French and English were either “Euro chic”
(read: safe for couples) softcore — Lady Chatterly’s
Lover 1981), Mata Hari (1985) — or
lame, leering American sex comedies, the biggest hit being Private
Lessons (1981). One of her weirder assignments was a
supporting role in the really horrible Get Smart
feature The Nude Bomb (1980).

She later discussed in
her autobiography Undressing Emmanuelle the highs
and lows that movie stardom conferred upon her in the late Seventies
and early Eighties. She dated gents like Vadim, Depardieu, and Beatty
as she made the move from France to L.A. She also cultivated a
cocaine habit, had trouble with alcohol, and entered various
relationships looking for a “father figure.” The most salient quote
she provided for this period comes from her autobio: “sooner or
later the debt must be paid... women are charged a great deal for
having been beautiful, unfairly different, attractive, for provoking
unsatisfied desire.”

She remained a very
good-looking woman up until her death, but those of us who continued
to watch her movies throught the Eighties and Nineites were well
aware that she was that was making horrible choices in both her life
and her career — especially when you see her in absolute L.A.-made
straight-to-video crap like Beauty School(1993). The film was clearly made to be
funny but, as the trailer indicates, it’s just fuckin’ awful.

Her rather
wild lifestyle did begin to make her look slightly older onscreen —
especially when she suddenly appeared with curly hair, dyed red, in
no-budget potboilers. I did actually pay to see the first few
Emmanuelle sequels in theaters and, as is true of
every series, they got worse as they went along.

Emmanuelle:
The Joys of a Woman (a much better title than the original
“Emmanuelle 2”) led to Goodbye, Emmanuelle, which was
just absolutely awful. The only thing I remembered about the film was its very catchy theme song.
Years later I discovered that the song had been written by Serge
Gainsbourg and performed by Serge and Jane Birkin. This is definitely the
best thing about the third installment:

Kristel still looked
very good in 1984, but the time had come, apparently, to find a
newer Emmanuelle. Instead of simply replacing her outright, it seemed
that the producers wanted to publicly humiliate her by having her
appear in the dreadful Emmanuelle 4 as a woman
named Sylvia who flees her boyfriend by going to Brazil and getting
“extensive plastic surgery” (so sez the Wiki for the film; I seem
to remember her entering some kind of chamber or something).

When she emerges with
her new (younger, natch) face, she is “Emmanuelle,” played by the
actress Mia Nyrgren. I was embarrassed for Kristel when I saw the
picture (which was shot to be shown in 3D and had “explicit”
scenes included in its European and VHS versions).

Little did I know that
she reprised her most famous role again, several times, in a
made-for-cable series of films made in 1993-94, in which she was
actually billed as “Old Emmanuelle” — the sex scenes were
undertaken by an actress playing the younger Emmanuelle (and one of
the costars was the one-time-only Bond, George Lazenby). I should
note that when she did Emmanuelle 4 she was 32,
and when she was “Old Emmanuelle” she was exactly 41.

Therefore, it makes
perfect sense that Sylvia went back to the Netherlands and continued
to work as an actress in less racy material. She was an avid painter
and directed a short cartoon in 2004 about the ways in which her
mentor, artist Roland Topor, changed her life (you can see two
minutes of the cartoon on her IMDB page).

Some of the obits for
Sylvia referred to her as having been “the world's most famous porn
star” at one time. She was never a porn star, she was an actress
who was as sexy and elegant in clothes as she was out of them.

*****

I found many wonderful
video tributes to Sylvia online, including this one (scored to Serge and Jane). The gentleman who runs the Sylvia Kristel fans blogspot has let us hear the lady speak for
herself, with uploads of interview footage from the extras on the
Emmanuelle DVDs:

The first
Emmanuelle was the sexiest film she was ever in,
but it was one of two films she was in that did phenomenally over
here. The other one was the coyly sleazy Private
Lessons. Here is the famous scene where she undresses to
excite a young boy, carefully edited of course to remove any nudity
(YouTube is an American-owned company, and as such can't deal with
the sight of the human body).

It's a really goofy
scene, with dippy music, but Sylvia does look wonderful, and I have
the uncanny feeling that no film like this could be made in the
American mainstream anymore, since we've gotten to be an even more
Puritanical society in this, the age of the Internet:

The best musical number
I found by her on the Net was this nice bossa nova tune, “Changes,”
performed by Sylvia with the Eddy De Clercq Quartet:

I decided to close out
this tribute with three clips that I couldn't find anywhere online,
so I uploaded them myself. The first is her entire appearance from
the Alain Robbe-Grillet film Le Jeu Avec Le Feu
(aka “Playing with Fire,” 1975).(Thanks much to Paul G.)

Robbe-Grillet's films
are odd affairs that use the cyclical, open-ended construction of his
nouveau roman novels, but they also have several
sequences in which women are seen tied up. In this instance Sylvia is
the victim and, although she looks lovely, she is shamelessly thrown
in and then tossed out of the picture. NOTE: The English subtitles for this film make no sense, but that shouldn't affect your viewing experience.

The second film
represents her most notable starring turn for an “auteur,” Claude
Chabrol's Alice ou la derniere fugue (1977). The
film is intriguing and downright bizarre at times, but is mostly
notable for being the only adaptation of Lewis Carroll in which Alice
is alone for long periods of time and only encounters a small handful
of not-so-colorful characters! (But yes, she is naked here, so the
clip briefly becomes NFSW).

And finally, my
favorite moment from the “lower end” of Sylvia's career, her
attack on Linda Blair at the end of the women-in-prison pic Red
Heat (1985). The film is ridiculous, but wonderfully so at
times. The scene that ends this montage is one of those times.

Friday, October 19, 2012

Leos Carax burst on the film scene back in 1984 with his
debut feature, Boy Meets Girl, a quiet, charming work that
signaled that a major talent had arrived. In the 21 years since his exquisite
third film, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), Carax has turned
out only a short and two features, and each has been highly anticipated by his
growing fan base.

His latest feature, Holy Motors, which opened this week, is an
incredibly ambitious yet playful work that finds his immaculately talented
onscreen alter-ego, actor Denis Lavant, assuming a variety of roles as a
mysterious man who tackles a number of “jobs” (each requiring a different
identity) in the span of a single day.

Carax structured the film so that his protagonist can move
easily from genre to genre. The only information we're given about him at the
outset (which may or may not be the reality of his life) is that he's a rich
man who is picked up in the morning by a chauffeur (Edith Scob) who transports him to each of his assignments. Thus, Lavant slides into a number of different personas: a
pathetic homeless man, an impossibly limber motion-capture model, an urban dad with a shy
teenage daughter, an old man ready to die, a hitman, a forlorn lover and, most
memorably, a sewer-dwelling troglodyte who terrorizes Paris and claims as his prize
a hot model (Eva Mendes).

And there I dispense with plot, as I'm sure Carax wanted to
do in the creation of this picture. The list above leaves out an absolutely
wonderful musical interlude where, apropos of nothing, Lavant leads a motley
(but killer) accordion band through what looks to be an abandoned church. Throughout
the picture, Carax connects with a number of movie genres, from Jacques
Demy-like romance to Ishiro Honda-inspired city-trashing, having fun all the
way. The main virtue of Holy Motors is its wild unpredictability.

Although this is his first feature shot on digital, Carax
puts his love of film at the forefront, starting the proceedings with a
Lavant-less prologue in which he, Leos, makes up and wanders in his pajamas
into a movie palace filled with immobile, seemingly sleeping, patrons. When a
filmmaker acknowledges at the outset that the film we're watching is his dream,
absolutely anything is possible.

Like the anthology features made in recent years by Wong
Kar-Wai, Jim Jarmusch, and Takeshi Kitano, the film plays at first like an
“interim” work, which has fortunately spawned some bravura set-pieces that rank
with the best of Carax's work. The vignettes each have their virtues, with the
troglodyte segment (spun out of Carax's contribution to the anthology feature
Tokyo!) being the most feverishly weird and entertaining,
and the sequence in which Lavant plays a dying old man feeling the hardest to
wade through – especially since its dour tone is shortly followed by two broadly
comic moments.

As noted above, the film provides a tour-de force showcase
for Lavant. We see him applying and removing makeup in the limo, but once he appears in each vignette, he is fully transformed and demonstrates that
he’s a character actor extraordinaire (who can also be a very unconventional
leading man). There is literally nothing out of the range of his small frame
and visage.

As a further homage to the glories of cinema past, the
supporting cast has some very familiar faces. Besides Eva Mendes (whose job as “Beauty”
is to simply attract Lavant’s Beast), Carax has scored a cameo by the legendary
Michel Piccoli, who costarred in his terrific evocation of silent cinema and
the French New Wave, Mauvais Sang (1986). Piccoli is one of
the few actors still alive (besides, obviously, Moreau and Leaud) who carries with him a
wealth of French cinematic references – from Le Mepris to
Belle du Jour and on and on.

Also offering cinematic echoes of her own is the actress
playing the dutiful chauffeur. Edith Scob dons a white mask in one of the film’s
final scenes, evoking her unforgettable starring role in George Franju’s horror
classic Eyes Without a Face (1960). On a lesser level, Kylie
Minogue appears in the segment intended to evoke Demy, bringing with her a pop
stardom that echoes that of the ye-ye girls and “dollybird” singers who
appeared in Sixties comedies and pop fantasies.

What some sour souls may see as the deficits in Holy
Motors — its jumps in tone, its expectation that the viewer will
follow along from scene to scene, its very odd payoff(s) — makes it one of the most adventurous
films to appear in some time (from a director not named von Trier) and a very rewarding
head trip.

*****

I’ve been talking about Carax’s work on the Funhouse TV show
for several years now. The first episode I did about him was back in 1995.
Foremost among the items shown at that time were his musical moments, beginning
with this lovely visualization of a number by the “Anthony Newley-era” David
Bowie from Boy Meets Girl (1984):

Carax does indeed do miraculous work visualizing pop music
(yet has never made a music-video yet, bless ’im). One his best-ever moments is
this mega-kinetic celebration of the joy of love, enacted by Lavant in
Mauvais Sang (1986):

The film that “broke” Carax in France, but has since become
a beloved cult film (and is thus far his masterwork) is the very unique love
story Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), aka “Lovers on the
Bridge” on American DVD. Here is the trailer (and, yes, that is Juliette
Binoche waterskiing on the Seine):

Pola X (1999) was his return to
filmmaking after the difficulties caused by Les Amants. It’s
the most difficult of his five features (the whole film is available in French here) and contains several moments that are intended to be highly jarring, like this
dream sequence:

I interviewed Carax in conjunction with opening of
Pola X in 2000. Here is a slice of him meditating on his
inability to get films made:

Here is the trailer for Holy Motors:

And I can’t resist adding the German trailer, which is structured
around the band-in-church musical sequence:

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Since
I’ve discussed what was utterly misguided on The Andy
Williams Show — but is compellingly watchable in many
instances as Sixties TV kitsch — I have to talk about what
did work wonderfully. The show’s best element
was the many duos and trios that Andy did with singers who were of
his “generation” (and older). As a quick fer-instance, he did two
incredibly smooth duets with Brazilian singers, “The Girl from Ipanema”with Antonio Carlos Jobim, and
the less-often-heard but equally beautiful “Samba de Verao”
(Summer Song) with Marcos Valle:

Given
his background as a “boy singer” backing up Kay Thompson, it
makes perfect sense that he dueted well with female singers, and that
he did with Peggy Leeand the
one and only Lady Ella. His duet with Aretha Franklin
doesn’t hit the right note, to the point that Andy has to make fun
of how un-soulful he is (to see a white variety-show host keep up
with Aretha, check out Tom
Jones’s wonderful duet with her).

One
of my favorite under-appreciated performers was singer-songwriter Roger Miller,
who came up with a string of great fast-paced, humorous country
singles in the Sixties (and the timeless “King of the Road”).
Andy and he dueted on “In the Summertime (You Don’t Want My Love).”
Roger handles the humor on that one (replete with eefin’ action!).

The
most energetic numbers Andy performed are the show were always in the
company of two other male singers (shades of his work with his
brothers?). This set-up happened frequently on the show, usually with
Bobby Darin in the trio. This occurred with Tony
Martin
and Eddie Fisheras the third side of the triangle. The oddest combo has got to be
Darin and the always-amazing Anthony Newley (who has “long hair”
for a 1966 variety show). Both Bobby and Tony seem to be into goofin’
around:

Also
of note to me (and Funhouse folk who love this guy’s
ultra-lounge-iness) is Andy’s warbling with the always amazin’
Buddy Greco. Trini Lopez is the third side in this instance, doing
the full version of “America” (which seems rather odd out of
context):

Sammy
Davis Jr. was a ubiquitous presence on variety shows, and never, ever
gave a less than energetic performance. Here he joins Andy to sing
“Breezin’ Along with the Breeze”:

And
of course, Funhouse viewers know I am fixated by the comedian
everyone hates to love and loves to hate, the one and only Jerry
Lewis. The most interesting exchange here occurs when Jerry is
shouting his lines as usual, and Andy notes, “I’m not used to
being yelled at.” Jer’s reply? “That’s how I lost my
partner…”

*****

Leaving
behind Williams’ variety show, I move back to his recording career
and must point out the fact that, after a certain point in time, it seemed like Williams was always singing instrumentals. Perfoming what sounded like a
hastily-lyricized vocal version of an instrumental was a staple of
most singers’ repertoire at that time, but it did seem like Andy
did a LOT of those prefabricated tunes. The MOR station my family
listened to during the day, WNEW-AM, was constantly debuting Williams
doing a vocal version of a popular instrumental, usually a movie
theme.

One
of the sorriest excuses for a lyric has got to be the set of verses
written to be sung to the “Love Theme” originally recorded and
brought to No. 1 in 1974 by the Love Unlimited Orchestra, a Barry
White project. I remember thinking even as a child that it was a
pretty sorry excuse for a song – and little did I know there was a
disco remix of Andy's version:

The
single best adaptation of an instrumental ever sung by Williams was
most definitely “Music To Watch Girl By,” which is emblematic of
the MOR Sixties in ways I can't even describe. Feast:

******

Like
a lot of MOR singers, Williams covered a whole bunch of contemporary
songs in order to find a new hit or fill up his albums (most likely
both). Many of the songs weren't right for his musical style, but
that makes them all the more fun to listen to now.

For
a long time it was rumored that the version of “Aquarius” from
Hair sung by Andy and the Osmond Brothers was left
on the moon by Neil Armstrong as a strange souvenir of planet Earth.
This story is debunked in this article on the Check the Evidence site.
However, the recording still remains a wonderful relic of the time
that “old” met “new” and the result was wonderfully cheesy:

Andy
recorded a lot of songs that seem really fucking odd when heard in
his echo-y silken style. Among them is the Classics IV hit
“Spooky”:

After
his variety show left the air, Williams continued to appear on
network TV. Some of those appearances made sense (as with
the homepsun Xmas specials). And some were very, very strange, as
when he sang Randy Newman's “Short People” with singer-songwriter
Paul Williams:

****

I
started this tribute out by noting that there are some Andy Williams
songs that make me cringe (“The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”)
and others that I never tire of listening to. The two that dwarf all
others in the latter category (standing tall beside “Music to Watch
Girls By”) are his catchiest pop singles.

The
first is “Can't Get Used
to Losing You” (1963),
written by Doc Pomus and
Mort Shuman. Covered
wonderfully by the English Beat in
1980 (with an echo-ridden sound that seems to duplicate Williams'
original, with a great ska backbeat), the song is one of the
catchiest and best things Williams ever sang:

And
finally, the Williams record that is surely his best-ever serving of
“pure pop for now people” (thanks, Nick). It's upbeat, fully
orchestrated, and uses Andy's self-generated echo chamber to best
advantage. Danny Boyle used it brilliantly in a mocking sense as the
end theme for his 1994 dog-eat-dog thriller Shallow Grave
(watch it here,
but you spoiler-shy cowards may not want to partake before seeing the
whole flick).

The song remains a pure delight and a kick-ass bit of an AM radio timewarp :

Sunday, October 7, 2012

I've
mentioned Andy Williams on this blog before in different contexts. I
have a conflict about Andy's mega-mellow, super-easy-listening
sounds. On the one hand, certain songs of his (one in particular!) make me cringe; on the other, I could listen to certain of his
MOR hits over and over again and never get tired of them. It's all
related of course to my chronological “relation” to his music
(read: I heard it as a kid, and that music never ceases to have a primal
pull on ya). I'll cover both “sides” of the Williams phenomenon,
as well as spotlight some of the wonderful clips from his variety
show, in this post.

First,
for a little context. Much was made about Williams being one of the
last “crooners.” Well, he definitely fit in that smooth-as-silk
style, but I've always felt that the thing that distinguished him was
the fact that his voice sounded like it was emerging from an echo chamber even when
he was singing acapella. He was thus perfect for the MOR
“sound” on unamplified, impure, and often crackly AM radio, and
also on the non-stereo TVs folks had before the Eighties.

So
who was this latter-day crooner who never, ever embraced that noisy
rock and roll stuff? (Although he experimented with a LOT of
pop-rock, as we shall see.) He was born in 1927 in Iowa, attended HS
in Cincinatti, and then finally made it to L.A., He and his three siblings quickly landed movie and record gigs (including singing background on Bing
Crosby's “Swinging on a Star”) as the Williams Brothers.

He
was mentored by the actress-author Kay Thompson, who took a personal
interest in him when he and his brothers broke up the act (Thompson
and Williams had an affair when she was 38, he was 19). She did
enough finagling to get him a lot of important gigs, including the
one that broke him for real, his stint as the “boy singer” on
Steve Allen's Tonight Show (the other boy singer
was Steve Lawrence, who now stands along with Tony Bennett as the
very last of a certain kind of male balladeer).

I
knew none of this when I saw Williams on TV. I viewed him merely as the
host of a number of programs — first a variety series (which ran
nine years, from '62-'71), then a number of homespun, family-deified
Xmas specials. As a TV host, Williams was slightly hipper (definitely
younger) than Perry Como, but his mellowness didn't exactly make him
a natural comedian (as Crosby could be when he was with Hope, and as
Dean Martin always could be — Sinatra, btw, pretty meager
comedian...).

Andy
was a devout “square” in an era when rock and roll became common
currency. In going through his credits, I was surprised to find that
“Moon River,” thought to be his biggest hit, was never a single
at the time it was released (1962, after he sang it at the Oscars;
Jerry Butler actually had the single hit with the vocal version of
the song). He did, however, reach No. 4 on the charts with the
pop tune “Butterfly,” which is in the mode of Guy
Mitchell's “Singing the Blues.”

To
get a serious dose of some pop-rock Andy Williams kitsch, I HEAVILY
recommend this sucker, a cha-cha number originally sung by Earl Grant
and released by Andy in '58. It will blow your mind, daddio... (it's
also catchy as fuck)

But
what did I know about this stuff when I was a little kid? I think the
thing I enjoyed the most about his show (but also puzzled over) was a
bear that wanted cookies all the time (yes, there was an overlap with Sesame
Street).

There
are two actors listed as being in the bear suit on the show in the
IMDB listing, the most prominent being the “furry emeritus” Janos
Prohaska. I'm not sure which actor is in the suit in this clip, which
also features American instituion (and non-red-hot-mama) Kate Smith:

*****

Williams
became inextricably linked in the minds of a lot of Americans with
Christmas — and in fact his music is played on mainstream radio
*only* at that time of the year these days (but that is because
American radio is a sad cadaver that only digs out old music when the
Yuletide season comes around). This is where I'll bring in the cringing I
sometimes do when confronted with Williams' music.

His
Xmas shows were indeed so homespun they could make ya choke, and they
definitely overplayed the Currier and Ives adorable Americana aspect.
For example, here, with a nice fake blue-screen (it was blue-screen back then) is Andy taking a sleigh ride with his singers.

And
then of course there's his many fireside moments with his then-wife
Claudine Longet — the two continued to appear together on the later
Xmas specials, even though the public knew they were divorced in real
life (admittedly, it was less unctuous and pathetic than Sonny and Cher
when they returned to the air to argue as a divorced couple in the
mid-Seventies).

Longet,
who is still alive, is most infamous for having shot her lover
Vladimir “Spider” Sabich. Her claim was that the gun accidentally
discharged into him when he was showing her how it worked — this
was countered by evidence that noted that he was across the room from
her and turned away at the time of the shot.

Also,
there was a diary she kept in which she documented how the
relationship wasn't going well — and thus, in one of those nice
quirky twists of justice, she served 30 days in prison and paid a
fine (she also got to choose which 30 days she spent, they were not
consecutive). How extreme!

Anyway,
what the Williams clan showed each Xmas was a united front — Andy
and his brothers would reunite, Claudine and the kids would be
together with him, and as many other relatives and guest stars as
could be crammed onto the roster would appear in one cozy-home
setting. But there was also THAT SONG...

Written
for Williams' 1963 Xmas LP by Edward Pola and George Wyle (who was
the vocal director for Williams' TV show), "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" caught on in the
years that followed, thanks to Andy performing it every year on his
show, and the fact that it is the single most lying-est goddamned Xmas
song ever.

Think
about it. “White Christmas,” “Blue Christmas,” “Have
Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “The Christmas Waltz” —
most of the modern Xmas songs are pretty down-hearted, but Andy's
tune is a celebration of everything that exists purely in
holiday-fantasy-land.

It's
a catchy, hooky, upbeat Xmas nightmare and it literally HAUNTS the
fuck out of all of us each Yuletide. It is a Christmas ritual, and
these days I know that shopkeepers have decided the Xmas
season is ON (usually the day after Halloween) when I hear this song
coming out over a supermarket or convenience store speaker
system. Abandon hope, all ye who hear Andy's merry declaration:

*****

The
Andy Williams Show was yet another of the mind-bogglingly
odd and amorphous variety shows in the Sixties that mixed the “old”
and the “new” in stranger and stranger ways. As the “youth
revolution” of the time was going on, these shows hugged tightly to
the old, familiar ways of show biz.

Let's
put it this way — Johnny Cash was perhaps the smartest of all the
singers who hosted a variety show when he contracted to appear in no
comedy sketches. Aside from Dean Martin (whose sketches ran the gamut
from amusing to dowrnight godawful), the singers who hosted variety
shows were not good comedians, and their writing staffs were mandated
to write family-friendly comedy that was, to be kind, mediocre.

I
submit as evidence this clip from The Andy Williams Show that begins with an awesome bit of
Jonathan Winters ad-libbing with Andy, but then swiftly degenerates
into a terrible sketch about a no-budget local TV station featuring
Winters, Ozzie and Harriet, and Karen Carpenter (on drums!). The
frame from Jonathan is great, the sketch is just unbelievable:

The
clash of the “new” and the “old” was never as jarring and
entertaining as it was in this appearance by Bette Davis, who sings a
specially-written song to promote Baby Jane (it's
a fucking twisting song!). Given that the film is a totally
brilliantly deranged horror film/character study, this bit of odd
promotion becomes even odder:

And
what better to follow that than Miss Davis with the New Christy
Minstrels and Andy singing “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore.”
Variety shows were wildly unpredictable at times:

Andy
was indeed awful at comedy, but he did have some good comedians on
his show. The only problem was that, for some reason, his producers
thought it wise that he stay on the stage with them as sort of a
straight man or a talk-show type inquisitor. He stays onstage for the
opening of this appearance by Vaughn Meader, and is a wholly unnecessary interlocutor
for a young Woody Allen:

This
“why is Andy on the stage with these people?” factor also comes
up when one watches him singing along with the younger musical acts
of the Sixties. His becoming a fourth member of Peter, Paul and Mary kind of works, but him insinuating himself
into Simon and Garfunkel is oh-so-pointless.

Add
to that his odd musical number with the Carpenters, a rather clunky rewrite
of the Beatles “Ticket to Ride” in the first-person plural
(“We've got a ticket to ride, and we don't care...”). And what
can be said about Andy becoming a part of the Ike and Tina Turner Review,
doing a duet with Tina?

One
of the cases where Andy was included in a rousing closer number is
fascinating, in that he's not completely unnecessary, he's just the
“lowest voice” on stage that serves to lead to the louder singers
assembled around him: Mama Cass, a young Elton John, and Ray Charles.
The last-mentioned duo play piano on the pop-gospel number “Heaven Help
Us All”:

Thankfully,
the Williams show featured younger performers on their own before
they were forcibly detained with Andy. There are memorable turns
online by Elton John, The Jackson 5, and Andy's label mates, the
utterly awesome Sly and the Family Stone:

Further
proof of the wondrous weirdness that was the Sixties is this terrific
turn by Tiny Tim singing “I’m a Lonely Little Teardrop":